Jockstraps in the Freezer

In his preface​ to the new edition of My Search for Warren Harding, Robert Plunket remembers being in the room with George W. Bush when he was told that a second plane had hit the Twin Towers. Bush was reading to a group of schoolchildren in Florida and Plunket, then a journalist on the Sarasota Magazine, was part of the press corps. We’ve all seen the footage: an aide whispers in Bush’s ear; he blinks, looks nervously around and continues reading for another five minutes. Plunket imagines that he played a part in helping the president maintain his composure. ‘Our eyes locked and in that moment I like to think it was my reassuring smile that gave him the courage to hold on when, to channel Celine Dion, there was nothing left except the will which says to him hold on.’ Attributing lines from Kipling to Dion tips the anecdote into farce. But, like the narrators of the two novels he published before he became a gossip columnist, Plunket is not about to let the truth get in the way of a good story.

Plunket was born in Texas in 1945. His father was an executive for an electrical company, and Plunket spent most of his childhood in Mexico City and Cuba before trying to make it as an actor, first in New York and then in Los Angeles, the setting of his first novel. My Search for Warren Harding (1983) follows a historian called Elliot Weiner as he searches for a cache of love letters supposedly written by ‘the shallowest president in history’. Along the way he gives us the backstory of Harding’s improbable political career, seduces the granddaughter of Harding’s now 80-year-old mistress and shares a nifty hack for making hollandaise in a blender. The book was well received, and Plunket began an ascent to minor celebrity, appearing in Martin Scorsese’s After Hours as a timid gay who tries to pick up the lead character, played by Griffin Dunne.

In 1985 he decamped to Florida – a place where ‘artificiality is many layers deep’ – and wrote his second novel. Love Junkie (1992) is about Mimi Smithers, a New York housewife who heads downtown in search of romance. She holidays on Fire Island, visits S&M clubs and gatecrashes the star-studded funeral of an Aids sufferer, from which she emerges feeling ‘fabulous’. Madonna loved the book and optioned the film rights. Jay McInerney praised Plunket’s gift for exploiting ‘the comic potential of a first-person narrator who doesn’t comprehend the implications of her own observations’. Despite all this, Plunket fell into semi-obscurity, writing books that were turned down by publishers, collecting rhinestone jewellery and moving into a trailer park.

Thanks to New Directions, Plunket’s two novels are now back in print. On its reissue last year, My Search for Warren Harding was hailed as a comic masterpiece all over again. It’s not as funny as the filthy and genuinely transgressive Love Junkie, but if you were a PR strategist planning to resurrect a literary career, you would be right to start with a scholarly romp about an American president rather than the story of a rich housewife who stores used jockstraps in her freezer. ‘I did think that eventually after I was dead it might be rediscovered,’ Plunket said of My Search for Warren Harding, ‘and then it happened before I was dead, which was a bit of a surprise.’

The novel opens with Weiner, newly arrived in LA, lurking outside a Hollywood mansion owned by Rebekah Kinney, a figure based on the real-life Nan Britton, who was not just ‘mistress of a president but had borne him an illegitimate child, and then, to top it off, had written a bestseller about the whole thing’. Suspecting that the now wheelchair-bound Kinney might still have letters from Harding, the discovery of which could make his career, Weiner rents her pool house and starts to spy on her. Kinney rarely leaves her room, so Weiner sets about seducing her overweight granddaughter, Jonica, who is planning to divorce her husband, Vernon, ‘a hillbilly songwriter’. Jonica duly falls for him and tells all: her grandmother has a trunk full of Harding’s papers.

As Danzy Senna writes in her introduction to the new edition, Weiner is a sensitivity reader’s nightmare: he is racist (Puerto Ricans are ‘aggressive and vindictive’), misogynistic (‘Most women … need time for themselves. God knows what for’), antisemitic (‘a sickly Jew from Chicago known as the Nose’), fatphobic (‘You fat pig slut!’), classist (‘Vernon was white trash’) and homophobic. The only person Weiner hates as much as Jonica is a gay man he encounters at a dinner party: ‘“Looks like somebody’s been reading Apartment Life” said the faggot.’ But the real reason he hates this man is that he clocks Weiner from the moment they meet.

‘The problem’, Plunket said, reflecting on the novel’s reception in 1983, was that ‘nobody realised Elliot Weiner was gay … It found this unfortunate audience with men who hate women, who delighted in Elliot’s cruelty without really understanding it. But it’s a gay novel – that’s really what’s going on.’ Plunket based the book on The Aspern Papers. For a long time, he couldn’t figure out why he was so fascinated by Henry James’s narrator. ‘One day it hit me. The guy’s gay! … His relationships with all the women characters were those of a gay man. Now, not an openly gay man or even a consciously gay man. But a man who was just not heterosexual at his core. I don’t think James realised what he had done, or how well he had done it.’

Weiner thinks he has duped everybody: ‘I have all these people fooled, it started to dawn on me for the very first time. In my own crazy, insane way, I am doing a spectacular job.’ His delusion is both comic and tragic. Even Jonica, who Elliot believes could be ‘declared legally dead on the basis of zero brain activity’, eventually sees through him. Weiner does get his hands on the trunk, but accidentally kills Kinney in a tussle over a letter in which Harding compares his penis to a donkey’s. He is finally undone when Jonica discovers that he has feelings for her husband – ‘You fairy!’ – and burns the papers in revenge.

Love Junkie is another novel about the delusions of love. The book begins with Mimi – whose husband is in India for work – hosting a party for Mrs John D. Rockefeller III, ‘president of the Museum of Modern Art’, in her tastefully furnished home. At the party she encounters Tom Potts, an assistant of Mrs Rockefeller’s, and becomes infatuated. Potts knows where to buy Hermès scarves and bags at a discount, which shops sell stolen haute couture and how to charm the doorman at Studio 54. ‘And he was funny!’ (‘She has more periods than a Hemingway novel,’ he says of a colleague.) But there’s something about Tom that Mimi can’t quite figure out. Rifling through his desk she finds ‘a half-dozen or so ampoules of something, each encased in yellow webbing. I looked at the label. “Amyl nitrite”. I had actually heard of amyl nitrite. Fred Farnsworth back in Tehran took it for his heart condition. I believe it stimulated the pumping action. How odd. Tom was a major hypochondriac.’

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Mimi says later. ‘What’s wrong with this woman? Doesn’t she possess a working set of eyeballs?’ But she has just got back from ten years in Iran, and this convenient backstory sets her up as a clueless observer of New York’s gay culture after the transformations of the 1970s: ‘It was not the same society we had left so many years before, that much was sure.’ Mimi loves her new gay friends. ‘For the first time in my life I was a member of the In Crowd.’ The In Crowd take her (well, tolerate her presence) on a trip to Fire Island, where she discovers the gay ‘clones’ of the 1970s: ‘the Great Middle Class of homosexuality’. At one point on the visit, she reads ‘an already yellowed clipping from some magazine. It was about that new gay cancer. A medical expert was warning the homosexuals not to panic.’ Judging by what Mimi sees when lost in the woods, however, they ignore it as completely as they ignore her.

The In Crowd take her along to an open-air concert, where she meets a porn star called Joel: a man with a chest ‘like Michelangelo’s David’ and ‘a touch of what my mother would call “the criminal element”’. He becomes Mimi’s next obsession. She goes to work for him, answering letters from fans who ‘use the name Donald for mailing and introduction but prefer to be called “turd”’, and managing his side hustle selling his dirty ‘athletic supporters’ and ‘Verbal Abuse Tapes’. Joel’s customers may be gay but he himself is not, as Mimi realises when his girlfriend, Nanette, shows up. (‘I knew he wasn’t a homosexual. I just knew it.’)

Nanette takes Mimi to the Hellfire Club, a notorious downtown S&M haunt, where she passes a newly skinny Potts who is ‘using pancake make-up’ to hide dark spots on his neck. Soon she’s trying out prostitution and cocaine (‘Chanel Dusting Powder’), selling her furniture to pay for Joel’s directorial debut and, with a little persuasion, starring in the film’s ‘Lesbian Encounter’ scene. When shooting is done, Mimi treats Joel to a cruise. He finally gives her what she wants and then dumps her: ‘You got your money’s worth,’ he tells her. And worse: ‘I swear I never had such bad sex before.’ On the cusp of committing suicide by suppository (really), Mimi is saved by a call from Ronald Reagan: her husband has died in the Bhopal disaster and the compensation will make her secure for life. In an epilogue Mimi swings by Potts’s funeral and sees Robert Mapplethorpe and Larry Kramer trailed by a group of ostentatiously weeping clones, ‘social climbing in death as in life’. ‘They’ll all be dead in three years,’ an old man says to her at the drinks reception.

Plunket has said the Aids epidemic was ‘fundamental to the concept of the book’. But, at the time he was writing it, ‘that word would never be mentioned. I can’t really say, but it was something to do with keeping your head in the sand. The book is narrated by a heterosexual, and that’s what heterosexuals did for five years – they did not mention the word.’ In retrospect, it’s not hard to see why Love Junkie’s treatment of Aids, and its loving mockery of gay life, might have contributed to Plunket’s fall from favour.